Contact centers can provide numerous services to customers, and have been doing so for years. The idea of a contact center queue is not much different from that of standing in line at a bank and waiting to be helped by the next available teller. However, there can be a lot of frustration if the first, second, or even third teller cannot answer a given question or set of questions. The same frustrations have been known to occur in contact centers. A company can gain customer satisfaction if they are able to answer their customers' questions quickly and accurately.
Contact centers (also referred to as call centers), such as Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) systems, are employed by many enterprises to service customer contacts (also referred to as calls or customers). A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming contacts.
As products and problems become more complex and diverse in nature, a single agent often no longer has all of the skills or expertise to fully service customer contacts. To service customer contacts more effectively, the contact center may route contacts to one or more resources with specific skills and attributes. For example, contact centers that handle computer customer service may have application resources, hardware resources, operating system resources, network resources, etc. While these resources may be well-qualified to answer questions on their particular subject(s), they are often unqualified to answer questions involving subjects outside of their respective skill sets.
Currently, resources may be assigned work, or vice versa, based on a number of factors that are considered by a selection mechanism. These factors may include, but are not limited to resource availability, agent training and/or skill, contact center state, contact type, and more. A specific selection mechanism may be applied to route work items based on, agent selection, queue selection, attribute selection or other desired mechanism. It is one goal of a contact center to maintain good customer service when handling contacts, and as such, many mechanisms have been developed to best distribute work to qualified agents in a timely and efficient manner. However, the work assignment mechanism of a contact center may not consider the most relevant data.